Riddick on the Record

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Starbreeze Studios waxes fantastic on its sci-fi remake, Dark Athena.

By Jeremy Dunham

With Sierra Entertainment's announcement that it would be releasing a remade version of its critically-acclaimed Xbox title, Chronicles of Riddick, we had a list of questions almost immediately. Luckily we had a place to turn to for answers when Starbreeze Lead Designer, Ian Stevens agreed to tackle whatever we threw at him. Here's what he threw back...

IGN: It's only been a few years since the original Riddick game was release on Xbox; Why revisit it and not just work on an all-new game?

Ian Stevens: For a while we were trying to get the original game onto the backwards compatibility list for the Xbox 360 and Microsoft seemed to have some pretty fair reasons why it couldn't do it. We were disappointed with that conclusion and we've seen the same disappointment in the community, so we felt compelled to find some kind of way around that.

The fact that we were already working with new technology for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 platforms lead to some obvious ideas, and the new technology is based on what we developed for Escape from Butcher Bay, so the subject of a remake came up pretty quickly.

We also had some hesitation about moving too quickly into a sequel. The story we tell in Escape from Butcher Bay is an important one, and we felt like it was a better decision to get that experience into the hands of a larger audience before moving on to something new and creating some gaps for gamers that had never played the original.

IGN: Is Dark Athena's core game based on the PC "Director's Cut" version?

Stevens: We will be carrying over the additional content that we created for the Director's Cut, but that's about the extent to which Assault on Dark Athena will resemble that version. We're going back and recreating a lot of content. We're adding a lot of detail to the original environments, reworking and tweaking many of the existing characters; we're creating a lot of new textures and audio as well, and making a few tweaks to the AI also.

We're definitely putting a good amount of work into enhancing everything that we can, and we're hopeful that this version of the game will be a real treat for fans of the original.

IGN: Tell us about the new storyline elements. What's it about, who's in it and when does it take place?

Stevens: We're expanding the single-player experience and that new episode takes place immediately after Riddick's escape. He and Johns stumble across the Dark Athena and encounter Revas, the Captain of that ship. It will be an interesting story to tell because we get to explore the role of Mercenaries in the Riddick universe. That's about all I can say for now. We'll have a lot more to talk about in the coming months.

IGN: How much time will that add to the single-player game (The original was sort of short)?

Stevens: This is an interesting question. We did get a lot of feedback with the original release that people felt the game was too short. We also received some criticism for being a first-person game but not having multiplayer. And this is an understandable perspective for gamers to have because they believe that longer games are better and they like Multiplayer. What's probably less obvious to our audience is that game development comes with a laundry list of competing priorities and it's a very difficult balancing act.

For Starbreeze, though, the priority has always been clear -- we have to make decisions that make the game better. Quality is the ultimate concern. And so, if we had tried to make Escape from Butcher Bay longer or if we had gone for multiplayer, the quality of everything would have diminished slightly as a result. You simply never have the time to make everything great, unless you narrow your focus. So we made the decision to go for the absolute best single-player experience possible. In the end this wound up being the right decision because, as a result, we changed quite a few people's minds about whether or not a game based on a movie franchise can be good; and not just good but great. To put it another way; you can chose to do 10 things moderately well, or five things extremely well. When you present questions like these to gamers in this way, I've seen that they too see the sense in killing your darlings and aiming for quality across fewer goals. So our philosophy is that it's better to go for depth than length, because too much of a bad thing isn't good for anybody, and wanting more of a good thing isn't exactly the worst position to be in.